Cultural Domain Analysis

Session Summary: 18.08.2011

Raj Puri

* Due to the shortage of time, the planned lecture was cancelled. The following is based on the text “Documenting Local Environmental Knowledge and Change”.

Group assignment by Tigers (Nickson Otieno, Nigora Safarova, Riin Magnus). Written by Riin.

Cultural domain analysis (CDA) is used for getting information about local knowledge, the categories people use, the relations between the categories and the items included in them. The categories are also named domains. The elements or items of which the domains consist are organized by rules specific to each culture. Identifying domains and their structure can serve as an entrance to the local knowledge systems at a much deeper level. It also allows the researcher to compare the knowledge of different people in a social group.

CDA can be divided into a number of steps and corresponding methods. For example, in order to identify the components of a domain, one can use freelisting and identification; to discover the arrangement of the components, triads and pilesorts can be used. CDA is often supplemented by a set of methods that help identify changes in communities over time.